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With just a little less than a month to go until Marvel Studio’s new film, Guardians of the Galaxy, Kevin Feige and his team are starting to roll out the early promotion for their 2015 film, Avengers: Age of Ultron, the eleventh film in their ever expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe. The first look of the new film, which will be present in a big way next week at San Diego Comic Con, was revealed in the newest issue of Entertainment Weekly.
Inside, the issue features a slew of new pictures from the film, as well as our first image of Ultron, the film’s villain, being played by James Spader via motion capture, which you can see below:
The issue goes on report that it will be none other than Robert Downey, Jr.’s Tony Stark who creates Ultron, all so he and the rest of The Avengers can take a little break from crime fighting:
“What you said about abdication is apt, but I think it’s also about recognizing limitations. The downside of self-sacrifice is that if you make it back, you’ve been out there on the spit and you’ve been turned a couple times and you feel a little burned and traumatized.”
Joss Whedon, the film’s director, then goes on to reiterate that point, while talking a bit about Ultron’s motivations as the film’s villain:
For better or worse (trust us, it’s worse), his Tony Stark has devised a plan that won’t require him to put on the Iron Man suit anymore, and should allow Captain America, Thor, Black Widow, Hawkeye, and the Hulk to get some much needed R&R as well. His solution is Ultron, self-aware, self-teaching, artificial intelligence designed to help assess threats, and direct Stark’s Iron Legion of drones to battle evildoers instead.
The only problem? Ultron (played by James Spader through performance-capture technology) lacks the human touch, and his superior intellect quickly determines that life on Earth would go a lot smoother if he just got rid of Public Enemy No. 1: Human beings. “Ultron sees the big picture and he goes, ‘Okay, we need radical change, which will be violent and appalling, in order to make everything better’; he’s not just going ‘Muhaha, soon I’ll rule!’” Whedon says, rubbing his hands together.
“He’s on a mission,” the filmmaker adds, and smiles thinly. “He wants to save us.”
Much of what Whedon says above has been heavily hinted at and assumed for some time now, but it’s good to see an actual confirmation that Tony Stark does, in fact, create Ultron in the MCU. It honestly makes a lot of sense, but it’ll be interesting to see if any of what Tony works on comes from information created by Hank Pym, better known as Ant-Man, who has his own film coming next year as well. Michael Douglas is set to star as an older Pym in Marvel Studios film next year, and with Pym being the original creator of Ultron in the comics, having Stark build off some of his work may be a nice nod to fans of the comics, that Pym still has a hand in Ultron’s creation.
You can check out the link above for more on the film, and be sure to catch the new Entertainment Weekly issue for more on the film. For now, check out these new pictures from the film below. The film, featuring an all star cast of Robert Downey, Jr., Mark Ruffallo Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Hemsworth, Jeremy Renner, Samuel L. Jackson, Elizabeth Olsen, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, James Spader, and Don Cheadle, hits theaters on May 1, 2015.
